"We can but try, dear!" Miss Templeton said consolingly, and she accompanied Gladys up to town, where they inquired of doctors, and chemists, and all sorts of possible and impossible people; and returned to Kew laden with chemicals, and patent beetle destroyers. But though they tried remedies by the score, none were of use, and the beetles repeated their performance of the preceding night.
Gladys did not go to bed: surrounded with lighted candles, she sat on the top of a wardrobe till daybreak. The following morning the house was fumigated with sulphur; and people were told off to kill the cockroaches, as they made their escape out of doors. By this means an enormous number were killed; but at night they were just as bad as before.
An engineer friend then suggested a freezing-machine. The temperature of the house was reduced to ten degrees below zero; the pipes froze (and burst next day), the milk froze, the housemaid's toes and the cook's little finger of the left hand froze, everything froze; and presumably the beetles froze, for there was not one to be seen.
However, it was quite impossible to resort again to this extreme measure. John Martin had the most agonizing attacks of lumbago. Gladys had neuralgia, and Miss Templeton—a slight touch of pleurisy.
When Gladys reached the Imperial that evening, she found that the staff had been battling with cockroaches all day, and that they had at last succeeded in getting rid of them with a fumigation mixture of camphor, cocculus, sulphur, bezonia and assafœtida—suggested to them by a Hindoo student.
For the next week not a beetle was to be seen at the theatre nor at the Cottage; and Gladys was beginning to hope that Hamar had ceased plaguing her (in despair of ever winning her), when the persecutions suddenly broke out again.
She had been in bed about half an hour, and was falling into a gentle and much needed sleep, when a tremendous rap at the wall, close to her head, awoke her with a start, and set her heart pulsating violently. Thinking it must be some one on the landing, she got up and lit a candle. There was no one there. The moment she got into bed again, the rapping was repeated, and it continued, at intervals, all night. This went on for a week, during which time Gladys was never once able to sleep.
A brief respite ensued; but it was abruptly terminated one morning, when Gladys awoke feeling as if some big insect were attempting to penetrate her body. Uttering a shriek of terror, she whipped the clothes from her, and sprang out of bed. Miss Templeton, who slept in the next room, came rushing in, and they both saw an enormous insect, half beetle and half scorpion, dart under the pillow. John Martin was fetched, but although he searched everywhere, not a trace of the insect could be found.
That night, directly Gladys got in bed and blew out the light, she heard a ticking sound on the sheets, and a huge insect with long hairy legs ran up her sleeve. Her shrieks brought the whole household to the room, but the insect was nowhere to be seen.
She was thus plagued for nearly a fortnight. One insect only—never a number, but only one, of prodigious size and terrifying form—appeared to her in the least suspected places, i. e., on the dressing-table or chimney-piece, in her shoes, or pockets; crawled over her in the dark; and could never be caught.